COVID

he Impact of Censorship on Covid-19 Policy Formation in the United States by Victor Wallis https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3822    https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3822/99193546939

Dissident doctors whose response to Covid was censored found a platform with right-wing politicians and media. This gave enhanced political legitimacy, ironically, to the very forces that were most opposed to the kind of regulatory policies and system of universal healthcare....

Contrary to the view advanced by right-wing ideologues, what threatens people’s wellbeing is not public authority as such, but rather public authority shaped by private interests. There is no way the needed improvements in public health can be attained without government playing a role. The Right plays upon people’s fear of government by invoking Orwellian images of totalitarian intrusion into everyone’s private life. But such intrusion is carried out by private as well as governmental entities..

Steven Johnson : I'm disheartened to see an article .. arguing some crucial points about the need for universal health care, mixed in with much more dubious and potentially discrediting points, and published in what appears to be a faux academic publication see http://flakyc.blogspot.com/2020/11/european-society-of-medicine-esmed.html
public health people did what they could to combat the endless B.S. attacks by the Covid denying industry/cult against each and every one of the only tools we have in our toolbox to address the pandemic: masks, distancing, contact tracing and isolation, vaccines, etc. And when they called that life-endangering B.S. for what it was, and refrained from
publishing it in prestigious journals, the B.S. production industry/cult
calls it censorship. 

Victor Wallis :  Instead of addressing the arguments given and the evidence cited,  he targets the author and the venue.... If what the dissidents asserted was simply wrong, the defenders of orthodoxy would be able to refute it. Recourse to censorship suggests that they are unable to do this.  Steven Johnson suggests that criticizing a big pharma-driven agenda  clashes with the goal (which we share) of working toward universal healthcare. Not so. A holistic approach to health-matters -- challenging big pharma's overemphasis on drugs, pills, and vaccines -- is consistent with a socialist approach to healthcare, which rejects profit-driven choices. Climate, Covid, Class, and Capital Victor Wallis   https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2023.2175974 parallel between the ecosocialist goal of biodiversity and respect for the complexities of the human immune system

Mofwoofoo: there can never ever be an "arbiter of truth".  Censorship is a big step towards totalitarianism and the Left should have never gone along with it

Taken from a discuss in WSM

Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand COVID-19's Effect On the Brain https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-intl-en 

tracking the long-term neurologic issues that some people with Long COVID experience --- cognitive decline, changes in brain size and structure, depression and suicidal thinking, tremors, seizures, memory loss, and new or worsened dementia have all been linked to previous SARS-CoV-2 infections. In some cases, these longer-term problems occur even in patients with relatively mild COVID-19.

The “Holy Grail” question now, Meropol says, is what’s going on in the brains of COVID-19 patients—and how to reverse the damage.

For the first time in nearly half a century, India witnessed a moderate decline in its life expectancy at birth during 2017-2021, a setback attributed largely to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.https://www.rediff.com/news/report/how-covid-cut-indias-life-expectancy/20250519.htm 

According to the latest health statistics, the life expectancy at birth, which had steadily risen from around 49.7 years in the early 1970s to 70 years by 2016-2020, dropped to 69.8 years in the 2017-2021 period.

Covid-related fatalities showed the highest percentage increase between 2020 and 2021, jumping from 160,618 deaths in 2020 to 413,580 deaths in 2021, a staggering 157.5 per cent increase, outpacing other causes by a significant margin.

Diseases of the respiratory system, already a major health burden in India due to pollution and underlying conditions, also saw a sharp rise, with deaths increasing from 181,160 to 305,191, marking a 68.5 per cent rise.

By Shikha Chaturvedi, Business Standard

19/05/2025

Why NGOs want to help but can’t  Pradip K. Saha Delhi 28 May 2021 https://themorningcontext.com/chaos/why-ngos-want-to-help-but-cant
Civil society organizations are crucial for last-mile delivery of services and relief, especially when a pandemic is raging. Yet the restrictive new FCRA rules have left them starved of funds and unable to respond to those in need.

So after the Covid lockdown, have most of the migrant laborers returned to work outside Bihar? 

https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/two-years-after-covid-lockdown-the-pain-of-bihars-migrant-labour-continues/

“Oh no, no! For the first time in my life it seems that the village has been populated. Over the years the boys and men of the village have returned to the village and are mingling with each other here. Now you will say that it is a matter of great happiness, but our village, which looks populated from outside, is miserable from inside. The reason for this misery is unemployment. For how many days can one feel good in the village with unemployment? Tell me?” asked Afzal Ali.

It was a question posed to us as reply to our question. Pankaj and I stared at each other. The village is full of people and there is much joy visible but the families are helpless, what kind of contradiction is this?

It turns out that most of the people of the village have been here for two years, because most of them have not been called to work in the big cities as yet. Many are still scared that their condition may become similar to that during the Covid lockdown – they may be trapped in the city without any support system to take care of them!

“If 40 people returned to the village, there were only  ten among them who had managed to return to the city for work. The rest are sitting around in village jobless” says Afzal.

The MGNREGA scheme, also known as the ‘100 days guaranteed employment’ scheme was meant to ensure that ‘every hand gets work with full wages’. So, what is the status of MGNREGA in this village?

Pankaj Ram provided the answer. He said, “How can people live on the basis of MGNREGA, sir? Low wages are also one of the reasons why MGNREGA does not attract people anymore.  On top of this the local panchayat can’t even generate 100 days of employment for the laborers in a year, that’s why people have also stopped asking about it. People would prefer to work instead of sitting empty handed but MNREGA work is simply not available”.

by Shirish Khare 

16/06/2022

read more

https://countercurrents.org/2022/07/the-wto-opts-for-greed-and-profits-over-providing-vaccinations-for-all-people-worldwide/ 

The UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima had appealed before the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference in Geneva that the world would face a grim future if patent waivers did not take place. At a press conference, Byanyima had said, “In a pandemic, sharing technology is life or death, and we are choosing death.” During the 12th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which took place from June 12 to 17, the rich countries did precisely that. They blocked almost all possibilities of providing cheap vaccines, antiviral drugs and diagnostics to the world. After two years of the WTO “postponing”—or blocking—the India-South Africa proposal for a waiver on patents for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, the club of the rich countries—the European Union, the United States and the UK—ensured that no worthwhile patent waiver measure was passed. The profits of Big Pharma once again trumped the lives and health of the people. This is also what happened during the AIDS epidemic.

In vaccine manufacture, it is not the formula of the vaccine that matters. Unlike many medicines, which are small molecule drugs and therefore easy to patent, vaccines are large molecules and belong to the group of medicines that are called biologics. The key to manufacturing biologics is not the formula of the compound but rather manufacturing it at an industrial scale and ensuring the production process of replicating the complex large molecules accurately. This know-how is guarded not under patents but under trade secrets. It is possible to duplicate these trade secrets or secure them by giving somebody who knows the process the job. But this opens companies that try to do this to costly legal action, including by the WTO. And there is also the threat of unilateral sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK.

The upshot is that Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies will continue to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives, even if this leads to new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging and causes the continuation of the pandemic. Less than 20 percent of people in Africa, which has a population of about 700 million, have been fully vaccinated, while millions of vaccine doses are going unused and are going to waste in the United States. We have the vaccine production capacity to immunize the entire global population, thus saving countless lives and reducing the possibility of new, dangerous variants emerging. But doing so is not in the interest of Big Pharma, for whom profits matter far more than human lives.

by Prabir Purkayastha 

23/07/2022

How Bill Gates and partners used their clout to control the global Covid response — with little oversight https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969 

Armed with expertise, bolstered by contacts at the highest levels of Western nations and empowered by well-grooved relationships with drug makers, the four organizations took on roles often played by governments — but without the accountability of governments. While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots. And they used their clout with the World Health Organization to help create an ambitious worldwide distribution plan for the dissemination of those Covid tools to needy nations, though it would ultimately fail to live up to its original promises.

The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.

Leaders of three of the four organizations maintained that lifting intellectual property protections was not needed to increase vaccine supplies – which activists believed would have helped save lives...

The last three paras of the report..  “You need to have a reckoning on this. The way the G-7, and the G-20, showed up in the pandemic was pretty disappointing, to put it mildly,” said a person who works with one of the four organizations and requested to remain anonymous to speak more freely about the state of global health care. “There was a complete lack of leadership. On this issue of equitable access, people made big statements, but they didn’t follow through at all.”

Without governments stepping in to take the lead on pandemic preparedness, the four organizations, along with their partners in the global health community, are the only entities that are in a position to lead in the world’s response to a devastating outbreak — again.

“They’re funded by their own capabilities and or endowments and trusts. But when they step into multilateral affairs, then who keeps watch over them?” a former senior U.S. official said. “I don’t know the answer to that. That’s quite provocative.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VbalqF7kkg 

In an interview about what he calls a “once in a century crisis” which hasn’t got anywhere near the media attention it requires and deserves, the Vice-Chancellor of the Azim Premji University says schools are struggling to recover the learning students lost during the two years of Covid when schools were either shut or not fully functioning. Although there are schools where “near complete recovery” has been achieved there are many where there is practically no recovery and many where it is patchy and very incomplete.

10/12/2022

Researcher claims mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can increase serious adverse events; calls for it to be withdrawn from the market https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health-news/breaking-researcher-claims-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-can-increase-serious-adverse-events-calls-for-it-to-be-withdrawn-from-the-market/articleshow/96854278.cms Jan 12, 2023, Joseph Fraiman, an emergency physician and a clinical scientist from Louisiana, claims that the messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine can increase serious adverse events in people, including sudden cardiac deaths. video  https://twitter.com/i/status/1612352266228441094  He found the vaccine increases serious adverse events at a rate of one in 800

This type of vaccine uses the mRNA that directs and instructs the cells to produce copies of a protein, also known as the “spike protein” that are found outside of the coronavirus. This triggers an immune response inside our bodies. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection against serious illness, hospitalization and death. While breakthrough infections are still prevalent, vaccines reduce the risk of severe infection.

India recorded at least 3.74 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 compared to two pre-Covid years, 2018 and 2019, according to the data on registered births and deaths released last week.

https://scroll.in/article/1082347/what-excess-death-data-shows-bihar-gujarat-undercounted-covid-19-toll-by-30-times 

Excess deaths or mortality refers to the difference between the total number of deaths during a pandemic or any other natural disaster compared to the number of deaths that would have been expected under normal conditions. The difference is an indicator of the likely death toll, as it captures deaths that went unreported.

The total deaths in 2018 and 2019 was 14.5 million. But the number of deaths in the two pandemic years – 2020 and 2021 – was 18.3 million, shows data from the civil registration system, which is the official record of births and deaths registered with the local government bodies.

This indicates 3.74 million excess deaths. In contrast, India’s official Covid-19 toll till date is 5.33 lakh. The first death due to the virus was reported in March 2020.

That is to say, India possibly undercounted Covid-19 deaths by seven times. If the government releases civil registration data for 2022, the gap could be higher. The civil registration system records events such as births, deaths and still births.

by Tabassum Barnagarwala